Comment by paultopia

“ Many companies, particularly tech ones, are deliberately trading trust for short-term profits.”

This is a general level dynamic. Leaders of all kinds of organizations, from companies to governments, need to build methods of self-control to force themselves to prefer their long-term interests (trusted brands, etc,) over their short term interests. That’s basically what corporate governance is. It’s also basically what constitutional law is, see the scholarship of folks like Jon Elster and Mancur Olson. (Source: my being a guy with a polisci phd.)

Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this dynamic as a major driver of platform governance challenges across social media as well as transactional platforms like Amazon in chapter 4 of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge University Press, August 2023). You can read an open access edition under a CC license for free at https://networked-leviathan.com/

Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” framework is also a great way of explaining how these problems get worse as companies acquire market power.